Gleason: Estrada rebounds with title after July stabbing

Tuesday

Nov 20, 2012 at 2:00 AM

NEWBURGH — Jaime Estrada thought someone had punched him. That's what it felt like while awaiting a cab on Route 17K that July night in the Town of Newburgh. Someone had come up from behind and punched him.

Kevin Gleason

NEWBURGH — Jaime Estrada thought someone had punched him. That's what it felt like while awaiting a cab on Route 17K that July night in the Town of Newburgh. Someone had come up from behind and punched him.

Estrada reached back to feel the punch and came up with a handful of blood. When he lifted his shirt, blood squirted out. Estrada, the Newburgh Boxing Club-trained fighter who won a Golden Gloves title in 2011, had been stabbed in the back, abdomen and left arm.

Now he was watching blood squirt from his side. "That's when I started to panic,'' he said.

Estrada, 18, spent the next six days in the hospital with a collapsed lung. A tube was inserted into his chest to drain the blood and fluid out of the lung to help it expand. He missed 1½ months of training, but on Friday night at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn, Estrada punched back. He beat another former Golden Gloves champ, Jonathan Jimenez, by three-round decision to win the Metropolitan Championship Tournament.

It capped Estrada's 3-0 tourney and return to the ring following his injuries. And it qualified Estrada for the U.S. nationals.

"I feel like it made me not become a better person, but stronger and smarter,'' said Estrada, still fighting at 123 pounds. "I'm wise in what I do. They (doctors) said if I wasn't in good shape, it could have been worse. I learned the hard way. I got a second chance in life. A lot of people don't get that.''

Estrada, a New Windsor resident, is a good kid. He doesn't hang with a bad crowd, doesn't go looking for trouble. But trouble can find you in and around Newburgh. He said he had problems on an earlier occasion with the kid who allegedly stabbed him. It was around midnight when Estrada left a party early to grab a cab to the Newburgh Mall. The new Air Jordans were out and he planned to wait in line for the mall to open.

People asked Estrada if he planned vengeance. But what would that solve?

"I have to move on,'' he said outside the ring on Monday evening. "When things happen, bad or good, it's for the better. I'm not going to take it like, 'Why me?' I'll take it as it happened and I'm done with it. I will be better than I was before.''

Estrada focused instead on returning to the ring better than ever. He worked extra in the gym. He ran more miles, sometimes day and night. Soon he had lost those eight pounds he gained from inactivity. "I knew I had to come back in better shape than I was,'' he said.

Rivera thinks Estrada will only get better. He's already good enough to turn pro. But Rivera and Estrada want to continue honing his craft. They want to make sure that he's well-positioned with a solid promotional team before taking the plunge. Estrada, a Newburgh Free Academy senior, is exploring colleges that offer boxing scholarships.

Estrada had a rough first half of the year. It began with him defending his Golden Gloves title by losing in the first round of the tournament. He had been hurt by the boxing club closing for seven months before relocating to Broadway in February. Then the stabbing in July. But Estrada saw it all as somewhat of a wake-up call.

"I feel like I was slacking off a little bit,'' he said. "I feel that it reminded me that (boxing) is my ticket out of all of this.''

kgleason@th-record.com;

Twitter: @th_KevinGleason

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